Public charging for electric vehicles is currently an adventure. Just finding a charging station can sometimes be a challenge.

The most common way to locate charging stations in unfamiliar areas is to use a locator app on a smartphone.

There are several available, but one of the more popular is provided by the ChargePoint network of charging stations. Its app not only locates charging sites, it displays the real-time status of the station: available, in use, or unavailable.

However, most electric-car drivers I know use PlugShare today--in part because it also includes residential locations where people are willing to let an electric-vehicle driver plug into their home charging station.

ChargePoint presently lists 33,000 public charging stations, while PlugShare shows 50,000 locations, both public and residential.

ChargePoint says its goal is to be the #1 app used by electric-vehicle drivers.

The previous generation of the Chargepoint app gave useful information, but felt clunky and unrefined.

For example, every time you opened the app you had to wait at least 5 seconds before it "found" you and your local charging stations. This was particularly frustrating when all I wanted to do was check the charging status of my vehicle.

Its symbols were rather simple and it felt like it had been designed for programmers, not for drivers and riders.

The new app has a significantly upgraded interface and a few new features.

Step 1 - Finding an available charging location

On the map view, the new App shows how many plugs are available for electric cars to use. You can tell how many are already in use by the pie chart that surrounds the central number.

If it's fully green, then all the chargers are available. If part of it is white, then some are taken and some are available. If it's fully white, then all charging stations are taken.

Step 2 - Plugging in

The main way to initiate a charging session used to be either a ChargePoint card or an RFID-enabled credit card. The new App now lets you start a session using your phone just by tapping the screen.

Many electric-car drivers who use public charging stations have Chargepoint cards, but those will no longer be necessary. This is a welcome upgrade, and it reduces the number of charge-network access cards you're required to carry to cover all bases.

The ChargePoint App also includes predictive searching: The app autofills your search with recent searches or nearby destinations. You can also choose which map service to use; options include Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze.

A satellite view of parking lots or structures is intended to let you see the exact location of a charger in a parking lot, so you don't have to drive around searching for it when your battery is low. This can be hit or miss, though, since some charging locations appear to be inside the building they're actually next to.

I found the new app to be fast: very fast. It took less than 2 seconds to load, even when using cellular data service, and the stations loaded quickly as well.

But the ChargePoint app continues to have some features that I find to be poorly designed.

One is that it clusters stations together when the map is zoomed out. Sometimes clusters can include stations on opposite sizes of a river. ChargePoint clearly made a conscious decision to do this, but I find it strange.